On Wednesday 16th November at 3pm, something strange has happened, a message of tolerance and peace were being spread in the cities of Rome, Milan, Tel Aviv, Paris and New York. Alessandro Benetton presented a new institutional campaign called ‘UNHATE’ by Unhate Foundation. Hatred exists in our modern society, this global campaign draws an awareness promoting closeness between people, faiths, cultures, and the peaceful understanding of each other’s motivations, using a global call to action and the latest communication tools.

”While global love is still a utopia, albeit a worthy one, the invitation ‘not to hate’, to combat the ‘culture of hatred’, is an ambitious but realistic objective,” explains Alessandro Benetton. ”At this moment in history, so full of major upheavals and equally large hopes, we have decided, through this campaign, to give widespread visibility to an ideal notion of tolerance and invite the citizens of every country to reflect on how hatred arises particularly from fear of ‘the other’ and of what is unfamiliar to us. Ours is a universal campaign, using instruments such as the internet, the world of social media, and artistic imagination, and it is unique, in that it calls the citizens of the world to action. At the same time, it fits perfectly with the values and history of Benetton, which chooses social issues and actively promotes humanitarian causes that could not otherwise have been communicated on a global scale, and in doing so has given a sense and a value to its brand, building a lasting dialogue with the people of the world.”

Over the past 40 hours or so, heavily absorbing all daily tweets #UNHATE, blog feeds and live updates on Facebook with overwhelming responses to the campaign, mostly positive. For more information about the campaign please click on the link below.

Finally I have got round to editing this video footage I did at the It’s My Time campaign shoot in New York back in April. It seems like such a long time ago but as soon as I started editing the video, those personalities of the winners came flooding back.

I actually had this song in mind as soon as I got to the shoot and saw their vivacity and enthusiasm pouring out. The song is from the 1957 film Funny Face starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn and at one point during the track you have to imagine Astaire’s shimmying tap dancing moves. It also helped that I got everyone to pull a ‘funny face’ of their own but obviously the meaning of the song transcends that of just having a purely ‘funny’ face and of course, the message is that there are no finite definitions to the word ‘funny’ – especially when applied to a face…